xdm rc scripts

[Dejan Lesjak]

On Friday 18 of February 2005 22:25, Jose M Rodriguez wrote:
> Hi,
> I launch PRs ports/74000 and ports/74003 time ago, to make launch of xdm
> from a rcNG script possible (Not mandatory).
>
> I think that this must be part of X11 clients ports, but if someone find
> any issue with this, let me know.

Hi,
Some of my issues:
In my opinion there is no need for a rc script to start xdm, since this is 
already taken care of by /etc/ttys which also starts gettys on other ttys - 
so all of gettys and xdm, which "[...] provides services similar to those  
provided  by [...] getty [...]" are in one place. This putting of 
configuration of things which are similar seems to be exactly what you 
intended, or am I completely mistaken?
Furthermore the PRs you submitted would require us to patch XFree86 and X.Org 
code which is not necessary, because that code is perfectly fine and has 
worked, works and probably will work for some time to come. We have in X11 
ports quite a few of patches which are needed to split installation of X11 
distribution into separate pieces to hopefully ease maintenance for users in 
case where only one component needs updating. These are the patches that will 
never be submitted to upstreams, since they are completely ports specific and 
both of X11 build fine without them. Your patch to 
programs/xdm/config/Imakefile would increase the burden of maintaining local 
patches for what, at least to me so far, doesn't seem like something that 
actually needs patching - xdm on FreeBSD will take the first virtual terminal 
available so hardcoding default doesn't seem to be the right way.
Which brings me to another point...
In your PR, you mention "race problems". Could you please explain what do you 
mean by this. If there is a problem that would be introduced with starting 
xdm through rc script, then that is another reason not to abandon the long 
time documented way of doing things, which works quite well.
Note that this only goes for xdm. If there is any script eventually included 
in either X11 -clients, then that script cannot take responsibility of 
starting things which come from other ports such as gdm or kdm (BTW, you 
forgot wdm). Kdm and gdm have their own maintainer teams who know how to 
start their programs properly and intruding into their territory with this 
script seems neither appropriate nor wise (consider that the way in which wdm 
starts changes in one version - how intuitive would it be to expect people to 
upgrade xorg-clients to get wdm working, not to mention why would people who 
don't use wdm or any foodm for that matter need to upgrade their ports). In 
short: stuffing startup of all display managers into one script would seem a 
bad idea.
So I haven't been convinced so far that making rc script for purpose of 
starting a kind of getty would be either needed or something that would 
simplify things. I don't believe that rc.conf is the only file users edit 
after their FreeBSD installation. I also don't believe that it would be good 
if things were changed so that rc.conf would be the only file users would 
need to edit. There was mentioned a question of policy vs. features among the 
thread discussing this... I don't believe a policy is dictated by having an 
example of starting xdm in /etc/ttys file - users can still make their own rc 
script if they want and configure it as it fits their purpose, be it "old 
style" rc script or rcNG one.


Dejan